(c) 2019
My average age at death has been
thirty-five
and in some centuries
that has been long enough.
This time, I feel behind the mark,
like I’ve lost something,
been buried one too many times.
These cycles
barely even fragments
of memory.
I sat on the front stoop,
wearing my red and blue stripped
jersey,
marbles in hand, scattered
jacks.
I was six—
freckle-faced,
and all I wanted was
to play with my big brother.
When his basketball bounced
off the side of the tenement
and rolled into the street,
how could I have seen that
car?
I recall a carriage once,
a train, another car—.
everyone hurtling
nowhere fast.
Of course, I was a witch. What woman wasn’t?
In Germany. America. Scotland.
In the house of MacDougall
they called me Chorra thon du,
the Black-bottomed Heron.
After his death, I turned my
husband
into a wandering spectre.
I didn’t drown when they dunked
me.
Branding, burning—
it took the rack
to draw my confession.
I did not drown like other women,
but when they bound me
to four others,
and lit us—
I burned just like a woman.
Again and again—
life takes me.
Widowed among the Igbo
my husband’s family took
my house, my land,
my children.
They shut me in with his body.
Flies gathered
at his wounds,
crusting his mouth and eyes.
At sunrise his sisters
threw water over me,
beat me
for not grieving loudly
enough.
The one who shaved my head
had not yet grown
her own hair back.
Illness, blade, fire, birth—
it comes and comes.
I keep hoping for comfort,
or better, for strength enough
to bear it.
Instead—
I sit in the dark,
nursing gin.
Smoking,
as if it might finish me faster.
The way I see it,
I am already dead.
